Dethick is but one of the three villages included in the ancient manor, the other two are Lea and Holloway; and in the days of King John, long before it came to the Nightingales, the De Alveleys had built a chapel there. Those who have read Mr. Skipton’s life of Nicholas Ferrar and know their John Inglesant, will be interested to hear that half this manor had passed through the hands of the Ferrars among others, and another portion had belonged to families whose names suggest a French origin. But the two inheritances had now met in the hands of the Nightingales. It is a very enchanting part of the Midlands. The silvery Derwent winds through the valleys, keeping fresh the fields of buttercups and meadowsweet and clover, and in the tall hedges wild roses mingle their sweetness with the more powerful fragrance of the honeysuckle, until both yield to the strange and overwhelming perfume of the elder tree. The limestone hills, with their bold and mountainlike outline, their tiny rills, and exquisite ferns, had been less spoiled in those days by the tramp of tourists; and the purity of the air, the peacefulness of the upland solitudes, would have a wholesome share in the “grace that can mould the maiden’s form by silent sympathy.” [Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s Father.] It was a very youthful little maiden as yet who had been transplanted into these English wilds from the glory and the sunshine of the Italy where she was born. After the valley of the Arno and the splendours of Florence, it may have seemed somewhat cold and bracing at times. Rightly or wrongly, the father of the little girls—for our heroine’s sister, named after another Italian city, shared all her life at this time—seems to a mere outsider a little cold and bracing too. He came of a very old family, and we hear of his “pride of birth.” His wife, on the other hand, whom Florence Nightingale resembled, lives before us in more warm and glowing colours, as one who did much to break down the barriers of caste and, with a heart of overflowing love, “went about doing good.” Both were people of real cultivation—good breeding being theirs by a happy inheritance—and each seems to have had a strong and distinctive personality. It might not be easy to say to which of the two the little daughter, who grew to such world-wide fame, owed most; but probably the equipment for her life-work was fairly divided between the two. There is no magnet so powerful as force of character, and it is clear that her father possessed moral and intellectual force of a notable sort. Love, in the sense of enthusiasm for humanity, will always be the heaven-born gift of one in whom religion is such a reality as it was with Florence Nightingale, but religious ardour may be sadly ineffective if defeated by the slack habits of a lifetime, or even by a moral and mental vagueness that befogs holy intentions. Mr. Edward Nightingale’s daughters were disciplined in a schoolroom where slackness and disorder